Apple Gratin in the Making and a Quiet Night

Last night the resort was having their annual holiday employee party, and as the new person in pastry, I was scheduled to work instead. Not that this bothered me too much; I’ve decided long ago that I’m not really a party person. What bothered me more was the silence. Everyone was gone that night, save for the few room service guys walking down the halls.

So of course I took this opportunity to utilize the entire kitchen to myself (teeheehee) since I had a big project to do, the apple gratin. Usually when we make the gratin, one recipe yields about 16 servings. This time it was for a banquet for next week, so I needed to make enough for 325 servings. At this point you can imagine how tired I get just by looking at apples.

Except for this one. It gets special treatment because it has a heart in it ❤

It’s hard to tell from the picture how big that pot is, but I could probably climb into that thing and sit down if I wanted to (if it were empty of course).

An entire case of apples, stewing away in a giant pot. By the end of the night, I had enough apples to fill 6 hotel pans, layering them with a sweet cinnamon custard, just waiting to be baked. The best part about this is that this is only half of what I need to make. So today when I go to work, I get to spend another few hours just peeling, slicing, and cooking another case of apples, and at the same time think about how I’m going to pull this all off and that in the future our banquets will just be getting bigger and bigger, and somehow we’ll pull those off too!